I was able to workaround the Thunderbird program limitation when running in Windows 11 by adding a shortcut to a registry specific startup folder (not the same folder as the default Shell:Startup) and then making sure the program is not set to run as...
I vote for this feature too. Thunderbird has a checkbox setting that minimizes the program to the Windows System Tray but it makes no sense why the developers have never written any code to give Thunderbird a checkbox setting that loads Thunderbird ...